Tag Archives: mp3

I recently ripped a bunch of my CDs to my PC again with the express intent of putting them onto Google Play so I could play them anywhere. Having listened to them this week I was shocked to discover that Google is censoring my music!

Whilst listening to The Willing Well III – Apollo II: The Telling Truth by Coheed and Cambria I noticed there were gaps. At first I thought the rip had failed, so I listened to the original MP3 and soon realised that the word “whore” was being cut out. The line goes;

Just come look at what your brother did
To that girl’s precious little whore of a body now

A delightful song, as you can see.

Then today, it happened again… this time the word it stripped out was – shock horror – “die”. Yes, really. The line is;

I hope you die right now

Again, delightful song. Again, Coheed and Cambria but this time the song was Upon Your Dead Body.

Somehow Google thinks that censoring my music is fine. That I shouldn’t listen to music about whores, death and dying.

I realised this probably isn’t some sort of automated censoring as, when playing favourite tune Make Yourself by Incubus, there was no censoring of these lines;

If you let them fuck you, there will be no foreplay.
If I fuck me, I’ll fuck me in my own way.

Liking my taste in music yet?

So I tried to find out why Google has deemed itself arbiter of taste and decency. Predictably, there was nothing in their help section but a quick Google found plenty of people discovering the same thing (apparently their “matching” feature often matches the ‘clean’ version of songs) and even a solution.

Can I really be arsed (censor that, fuckwits!) to go through every censored song to get rid of those ridiculous gaps though?

Why is Google even doing this? Censoring the word “die” FFS! What am I gonna do, listen to the song and then go on a murderous rampage? Comments are open…

Does Amazon does this? If it weren’t for their foolish reliance on Flash I’d be using their Cloud Player instead…